Just ask Hugh Molotsi, who received Intuit’s first Founders
Innovation Award in 2011, in part for creating and launching a business that
allowed storeowners and others to accept credit card payments and link it to
their QuickBooks program. But he’s also racked up his share of failure along
the way.

“Failure comes with the
territory” says Molotsi, a serial innovator who is also vice president of the
Intuit Labs Incubator. “You’re going to have to fall down and scrape your knees
a few times. You learn more from your failures than your successes. And if you
call it an experiment, you can’t fail.”

For small business owners who
may be struggling to pay the rent and meet payroll, innovation may seem too
intimidating to attempt. And many are reluctant because they confuse innovation
with invention.

While invention is all about
creating something totally new, innovation focuses more on improving existing
products or processes, Molotsi says. And it doesn’t have to be The Next Big
Thing. It can be as simple as finding a faster, more efficient way to do
something at work.

“More value is created through
innovation than through invention” he says, adding that innovators don’t have
to be the first to come up with an idea.

“Look at Facebook and Google.
Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Google wasn’t the first search
engine. But their people came up with innovative ideas that created
longstanding value.”

“Same thing at Intuit. Quicken
wasn’t the first personal finance product on the market. QuickBooks wasn’t the
first accounting product on the market. TurboTax wasn’t the first tax
preparation product on the market. The real value we created was based on
innovation.”

So where is the opportunity for
small business owners to innovate – and not invent – while still trying to
tackle the day-to-day obligations?

“If you observe somebody in
their workspace, you’ll find small innovations that improve work and
efficiency,” says Molotsi. “It could be on your computer, arranging your
desktop to make it easier to find and do work. Or it might be how you set up
your phone to have it alert you to do something. If you look around, you’ll
find things you do, big and small, to make your life more efficient and
better.”

Learning from failure is part
of the process, he says, citing a list of innovation seedlings that never quite
sprouted. Some, such as a product that would help companies establish and
manage franchise businesses, didn’t succeed because customers were reluctant to
upload and store their reports online. Another, which provided online business
reviews similar to Angie’s List, wilted when the company couldn’t update the
technology to keep pace with customer demand.

“We weren’t nimble enough,”
Molotsi recalls. “We would go three months between releases. Others were doing
it in days.”

Small businesses can follow
Intuit’s recipe for innovation, called Design for Delight, to make changes both
big and small. The ingredients include knowing your customer, starting broad
and then going narrow, and experimenting rapidly and being unafraid to change
if things aren’t working.

“Test your idea and make sure
it’s the most lean and efficient way to go and make sure it works. Do that
before you invest time and money,” Molotsi advises. “Find cheap ways to find
new ideas. Constantly do that. If you’re not experimenting, you’ll atrophy.”

Above all, Molotsi says,
business owners should remember that seemingly small innovations can produce
big results.

“You don’t have to be the
person who invents the jet pack” he says. “You could be the person that finds a
way to help lawyers become 20 percent more efficient.”

And of course, who wouldn’t
want to help a lawyer?

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